DENVER (CBS4) – As the cries for a change to the policy that is separating children from parents illegally crossing the border grows louder, Denver’s Archdiocese is saying there needs to be an end to the “immoral policy and pursue solutions that support family cohesiveness.”

(credit: CBS)

And for some who work for the Archdiocese this is an issue very close to them.

CBS4’s Jeff Todd interviews Juan Carlos Reyes. (credit: CBS)

“We migrated from Mexico when I was 12 years old. We came directly to Denver because we had some family in Denver, Colorado,” said Juan Carlos Reyes, the Director of Centro San Juan Diego.

(credit: Archdiocese of Denver)

Centro San Juan Diego is a Catholic resource center that established in the early 2000s to help immigrants acclimate to life in the United States. Now hundreds of people each month attend classes from how to start a small business to computers and GED completion.

(credit: CBS)

“I don’t have a clear recollection of the first two years when I was here because the situation was so traumatic so difficult you take it one day at a time, and I had my parents,” Reyes said. “If my two parents or my one parent would be taken away from me and I be put in a facility where I don’t know anyone where I don’t understand the language they’re speaking to me, I don’t understand the system. It is a culture shock.”

We join our brother bishops around the United States in calling on the Trump administration to end its recent practice of separating children from their parents at our southern border. These children and their parents are often fleeing violence and our country should not add to the inhumanity of their situation. While we understand a desire to protect our borders, we call on all lawmakers to urgently seek an end to this immoral policy and pursue solutions that support family cohesiveness.

“It is our faith that moves us to serve them to welcome them to help them integrate,” said Reyes.

Jeff Todd joined the CBS4 team in 2011 covering the Western Slope in the Mountain Newsroom. Since 2015 he’s been working across the Front Range in the Denver Headquarters.